As Ireland continues a national abortion debate, new information surfaced today showing an abortion caused the death of an Irish woman in 2010.
The Life Institute released information today saying the tragic death of a mother in the Rotunda hospital, where an earlier abortion was a cause, is a “salient warning that abortion can kill both mother and baby.”
The information shows coroner Dr. Brian Farrell found that a pre-existing scar caused by an earlier abortion, along with the use of misoprostol, part of the mifepristone abortion drug, was a principal risk factor in the death of Bimbo Onanuga and caused her uterus to contract. Onanuga, who lived in Finglas in Dublin, was attending the Rotunda Maternity hospital when she died in March 2010, having suffered massive internal bleeding. Her uterus had ruptured, and an inquest heard that her baby had delivered through the rupture into the abdominal cavity.
The inquest heard that a postmortem found that the site of the rupture had been weakened by scarring caused by an earlier abortion.
Dr. Sam Coulter-Smith, Master of the Rotunda, told the inquest that it was “probably reasonably safe to assume” that the scarring had been caused during a previous abortion, when Ms Onanuga’s womb had been perforated, and that this predisposed her to rupture. He also said that it was an “unrecognised perforation” and that the Rotunda had no information that any complication had occurred during the abortion.
Life Institute spokesman Dr. Sean Ó Domhnaill, offering his sympathies to Onanuga’s family, said that the media would be doing a “huge disservice to women if they ignored the central fact in the case – that scarring from an earlier abortion had led to this women’s tragic death.”
Ó Domhnaill told LifeNews in an emailed statement that the case showed that abortion clinics posed a real and substantial risk to women’s lives, and that abortionists were all too often “substandard practitioners who caused physical harm to women and did not even bother to report it”.
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“Clearly, the Rotunda were made aware of the earlier abortion, but not of the complication – the perforation to the womb – which caused the scarring. The question is: did Ms Onanuga even know about the injury caused to her by the abortionist? Is this yet another case of abortion malpractice where women die?” he asked.
Dr Ó Domhnaill cited the earlier case of Phaneul Dartey, who worked in a Marie Stopes abortion clinic in Ealing, where an Irish woman almost died after the abortionist left parts of the baby inside her body. She suffered a perforated uterus and almost lost her life, remaining on the critical list in hospital for two months.
